NBC’s new summer comedy “Save Me” stars Anne Heche as Beth Harper, a woman who discovers a new gift: she can talk to God. But Harper is no ordinary prophet. She has never been to church and lives a wild lifestyle. In the pilot episode, she stands over her husband’s sleeping body, ready to murder him with a hammer. She decides against it and goes downstairs to the kitchen and then nearly chokes eating a sandwich. Miraculously, she is “born again” to find that she can hear God communicating with her and she begins to use this ability to turn her life around.
In a promo for the show, Heche’s character tells a pastor that she can hear God talking to her and is relieved when he responds with affirmation instead of disbelief. However, then a man with mental problems walks up the pastor and tells him that he also can talk to God, only to get the same patronizing response from the pastor.
NBC ordered the show last year but has already decided to let the show die quickly by playing the already filmed 6 episodes back- to-back each week. Why? As an article in Slate explained, “on NBC, it’s a problem if a sitcom doesn’t deliver laughs, and this one doesn’t. It’s an even bigger problem if network shows don’t attract a big, broad audience, and it’s hard to imagine Save Me doing that, either.”
